What really fucks me up about a 40 hour work week and I’ve tried to explain to people over and over is that like of you do the math you have maybe 3 hours every day to just like. Rest and be with your family. And that’s kind of it
Like the average adult needs about 8 hours of sleep every night, so that cuts your 24 hours to 16 right off the bat.
You’re working for 8 hours, so 8 left.
But you actually work 8 to 5 at most offices, not 9 to 5, and that lunch is basically just long enough to retrieve food and eat. 7.
It took you 20 minutes to shower this morning, 10 to get dressed, and 45 to make a bowl of oatmeal and eat it. We’ll say 15 to get your stuff together and out to your car. 5 and a half.
You get home and have to cook dinner, 30 minutes min for that, probably more like an hour, so somewhere between 5 and 4.5 hrs left. And then you’ve got to eat it, 30 minutes if you’re being healthy about it.
So at best you’ve MAYBE got 4/4.5 hours left every week day and that’s assuming you ran exactly zero errands, didn’t stop by the gym after work, didn’t have to stay late, have a wicked fast transition time between tasks AND a commute of like 5 minutes by car. If you have to go to the store after a quick run at the gym, pick your kids up from soccer across town, and you factor in a 30 minute commute both ways, you’ve got enough free time for like one episode of show Monday through Friday. And weekends have got to be for cleaning the house and going to visit your mom for a few hours.
When do you write, or paint, or read or sew or go on hikes? When do you go on spur of the moment adventures with your wife and try to perfect your grandma’s soda bread? What happens when it rains on Saturday after being sunny all the rest of the week so you can’t go to the zoo that day and you don’t have enough money for the museum? Why are we all just content to postpone our whole lives, put off “happy” and “healthy” for a miniscule amount of extra value we’re producing for someone else?
And it’s also a thing that fascinates me about hustle culture like. When do y'all rest? When do sleep and food happen? How do you make 3 different jobs work without dying?
Idk idk like I said I’m real fucked up about it. It amazes me that more office workers aren’t great big socialists because we have this miserable job where we’re monitored constantly and just have to sit. Still. And maintain focus on ONE THING for EIGHT HOURS in a BORING GRAY ROOM with exactly two short breaks at designated times and I just?? How does that not suck for literally everyone else?? You said yourself, Angie, you’re useless after 3 pm so just?? Organize with me and negotiate for shorter days??? Like you’re literally already only producing 6 hours of value, you don’t need to be sitting there for longer than that.
…then add the Neurodivergent Tax of taking more time to do these things and recovery time afterward, and you’re looking at a deficit that has to come from somewhere
I saw a discussion of this on Twitter and honestly people defending hustle culture blow my mind. There were so many responses along the lines of “who needs 45 minutes for a bowl of oatmeal?!” and just… missing the point.
Of course you don’t need to take 45 minutes to cook a basic meal and eat it. You could hustle it. You could, say, “optimise” your lifestyle by taking time once a week to cook a batch of nutritious paste or whatever and just grab it out of the fridge each morning and stuff it into your mouth, chew while getting dressed, and be out the door in five minutes.
But is that any way to live? Did we, as a species, spend thousands of years developing the culinary arts and recipes so that most of the population could eat nutripaste each day?
Cooking is an art and a social activity, eating food is a social activity.
Hustle culture defenders are so ready to speedrun every aspect of their lives that doesn’t relate to work and it’s honestly horrifying. Why are you all content to just… not live?
